How to Find and Remove Duplicate Items in Monday.com (Complete Guide)

Monday.com is one of the most flexible work platforms out there. Teams use it for project management, CRM, HR tracking, inventory, marketing campaigns — you name it.

But that flexibility comes with a problem: Monday.com has no built-in duplicate detection. None. You can add the same client, task, or contact ten times to a board and Monday.com won't say a word.

Over time, this creates a mess. Your sales CRM board has "Acme Corp" listed three times. Your project tracker has the same task assigned under slightly different names. Your contact list has "John Smith" and "J. Smith" and "Jonathan Smith" — all the same person.

Here's how to find and remove these duplicates in Monday.com — including the fuzzy duplicates that a quick visual scan will always miss.

Why Monday.com Boards Accumulate Duplicates

Duplicates in Monday.com don't come from one source. They creep in from several directions:

Multiple team members adding items. Your sales team adds a lead. A week later, someone else adds the same lead because they didn't check first. Neither person did anything wrong — Monday.com just doesn't warn you.

Form submissions. If you use Monday.com Forms to collect leads or requests, every submission creates a new item. Someone who fills out the form twice becomes two items. Someone who was already in your board gets added again.

Integrations and automations. Zapier, Make.com, and Monday.com's own integrations create items automatically. Unless the integration is explicitly configured to check for existing items, it happily creates duplicates.

Imports from CSV or Excel. You import 500 leads from a tradeshow. Some of them are already in your board — but the import doesn't check. Now they're in twice.

Cross-board activity. Teams often have similar items across multiple boards (a lead in "New Leads" and again in "Active Opportunities"). Depending on your workflow, these might or might not be duplicates.

What Monday.com Can and Can't Do Natively

Let's be clear about the limits of Monday.com's built-in tools:

What Monday.com can do:

• Sort items by any column so you can visually spot exact duplicates
• Filter items by a specific value to see all items with that value
• Group items by column value (helpful for finding duplicates in dropdowns)

What Monday.com can't do:

• Automatically flag or highlight duplicate items
• Detect "Acme Corp" and "ACME Corporation" as the same company
• Prevent duplicates from being added
• Merge two items into one
• Show similarity scores between items

In other words, Monday.com is powerful for organizing data — but if that data is dirty, Monday.com won't help you clean it.

Method 1: Find Exact Duplicates by Sorting

For obvious exact duplicates, sorting is the fastest approach.

Step 1: Choose Your Key Column

Pick the column that should be unique per item. Usually this is Company Name, Email, or Task Name. If your board doesn't have such a column, this method won't work — you'll need Method 2 instead.

Step 2: Sort by That Column

1. Click the column header
2. Select "Sort ascending" or "Sort descending"
3. Scroll through the board looking for items where the same value appears consecutively

Step 3: Delete or Merge

When you find exact duplicates, decide which item to keep. Usually the one with more complete data, more recent activity, or older creation date wins. Copy any unique data from the duplicate to the keeper, then delete the duplicate.

Limitation: This only finds exact duplicates. "Acme Corp" and "ACME Corporation" won't sort next to each other because they're different strings.

Method 2: Find Fuzzy Duplicates with Export + External Tool

For real duplicate detection — the kind that catches name variations and formatting differences — you need to go outside Monday.com.

Step 1: Export Your Board

1. Open the board you want to clean
2. Click the "..." menu at the top right
3. Select "More actions" → "Export board to Excel"
4. Download the file

Alternatively, if you only need certain columns, use "Export selected items" after applying filters.

Step 2: Run Fuzzy Matching

Upload the exported file to a fuzzy matching tool. With DedupFuzzy:

1. Upload the CSV or Excel file
2. Select the column with names (or whatever field you're deduplicating)
3. The AI compares every item against every other item
4. Review potential duplicates with similarity scores
5. Download the results

Example output:

These are pairs Monday.com would never flag on its own.

Step 3: Merge Duplicates Back in Monday.com

Go back to your board and manually merge each confirmed duplicate:

1. Find both items using search
2. Decide which item to keep as the primary
3. Copy any unique information (updates, files, subitems) from the duplicate to the keeper
4. Delete the duplicate item

For large cleanups, this can take hours. Consider using Monday.com's API with a script, or tools like Make.com to automate the delete-after-merge step.

Method 3: Prevent Duplicates with Automations

Cleaning duplicates is reactive. Preventing them is proactive — and much better in the long run.

Duplicate Warning Automation

Create a Monday.com automation:

1. Trigger: When an item is created
2. Condition: Check if another item exists with the same value in [key column]
3. Action: If yes, add a "Possible Duplicate" status or notify the person who created the item

This won't stop the creation, but it flags it immediately so someone can review.

Standardize Data Entry

Use dropdown columns instead of free-text wherever possible. If "Company Name" is a text column, you'll get variations like "Acme Corp," "Acme corp," and "acme corporation." If it's a dropdown of pre-approved names, everyone selects the same value.

Obviously, this doesn't work for every column — you can't have a dropdown for every possible company name. But for columns like Status, Priority, Category, Team, use dropdowns religiously.

Configure Integrations to Update, Not Create

When setting up Zapier, Make.com, or other integrations that send data to Monday.com, look for options like "Find or create item" instead of "Create item." This checks for an existing item first and updates it if found, instead of always making a new one.

Real Example: Cleaning a 2,000-Item Monday.com CRM Board

A B2B agency used Monday.com as their sales CRM with roughly 2,000 company records added over 18 months. Sources included:

• Manual entry by 6 sales reps
• Website contact form submissions (via Monday.com Forms)
• Zapier integration from LinkedIn Sales Navigator
• Quarterly CSV imports from purchased lead lists

They exported the board and ran fuzzy matching. Results:

• 187 duplicate pairs from abbreviation differences (Corp/Corporation, Inc/Incorporated, Ltd/Limited)
• 94 duplicate pairs where one had "The" or "&" and the other didn't
• 63 duplicate pairs with typos or spacing differences
• 52 duplicate pairs where the same company had two contact records

Total: **396 duplicates in a 2,000-item board — nearly 20%**. After merging, the board dropped to about 1,600 unique companies. Sales reports finally reflected reality, and the team stopped double-contacting the same prospects.

When to Clean Your Monday.com Boards

Before big imports. Getting a new list from a tradeshow or lead purchase? Clean the existing board first. Then dedupe the incoming list. Then import. This prevents new duplicates from forming.

Before reporting. If leadership pulls metrics from Monday.com — number of active accounts, total leads, project count — clean the board first. Duplicates inflate every number.

Before migrating. Moving from Monday.com to a full CRM like Salesforce or HubSpot? Clean first. Don't carry duplicate baggage into a new system.

Every quarter as maintenance. Duplicates accumulate slowly. A quarterly cleanup keeps your boards trustworthy.

The Bottom Line

Monday.com is a great work platform, but its lack of duplicate detection is a real weakness once your boards grow beyond a few hundred items. Sorting handles exact matches. For real-world duplicates with name variations, typos, and formatting differences, you need fuzzy matching.

Export your board, run it through a proper deduplication tool, merge the results, and repeat quarterly. Your Monday.com data will actually mean something — and your team will stop wasting time on duplicate work.